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Medium Cool. (Home Video).-

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Directed, written, and photographed by Haskell Wexler; produced by Tully Friedman and Haskell Wexler; music by Mike Bloomfield; starring Robert Forster, Verna Bloom, Peter Bonerz, Marianna Hill, and Harold Blankenship. Color, 110 mins, DVD. Released by Paramount Pictures.

Perhaps the whole world wasn't watching; nevertheless, Haskell's Wexler's Medium Cool (1969) was among the most talked about and, arguably, most influential American movies of the late Sixties. Lacking the commercial clout of Easy Rider, the radical cachet of Robert Kramer's Ice (both 1969), or the rock-star buzz of Gimme Shelter (1970), Wexler's fiction-documentary hybrid claimed heated attention on three fronts: de facto censorship, formal innovation, and utopian visions of industry reform. It became a minor cause celebre due to an initial 'X' rating, levied not for sexual content but for inflammatory crowd noise like "Fuck the Pigs!"--in the audio commentary on Paramount's DVD release, Wexler calls the decision "a political X." Climactic scenes recorded in the midst of street demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago were hailed at the time as a sign of Hollywood's belated openness to narrative experimentation, bearing the vague promise of a style capable of reconciling the dema nds of European modernism, stark social realism, and conventional storytelling. Finally, in certain New Left circles Wexler's impeccable dual credentials as premier...

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